Sunshine on Leith Walk

At last the snowdrops have pierced the cold ground.  There they were, under the hawthorn hedge among the blackbird-pecked windfalls, their green spikes with just a flash of white.   Spring is most definitely here.  In some parts, daffodils are out and rhubarb is sprouting.   Despite all the gloomy predictions, it has been a mild winter so far. No rarities have come to the bird table, unless you count the woodpecker, no long tailed tits, no bramblings, just the garden birds - the tits, great, coal and blue: the sparrows, house, tree and hedge: the finches, green, chaff and gold: the robin, the wren, the blackbird, the collared dove and the wood pigeon.   We had our annual visit from the pheasant, hiding from the guns and the occasional raiding jackdaw but nothing unusual.

Spring having apparently sprung, it was with spring in my step that I set off with LotH for a trip to the capital.  Park-and-ride is the greatest idea yet.  No fighting through traffic, no exorbitant city parking charges, just leave the car at Newcraighall and take a train to Waverley.
Beside the steps to the station platform is a monument to the late Bill Douglas, film-maker, whose harrowing trilogy  My Childhood,  My Ain Folk and My Way Home was made with local  inhabitants playing the parts.  They are worthy of  the revival that was mounted in October last year.   Bill Douglas was born in the depression - hit mining village of Newcraighall in the thirties and grew up in  material and emotional poverty, but escaped by way of National Service and a career in acting then film making.
His films can be seen on YouTube.

Bill Douglas memorial, Newcraighall

LotH left for the shops to undertake what I understood to be some absolutely essential transactions while I set off down Leith Walk to find a book binder to recover an old battered history of the village which has been long out of print.
 This copy was signed by the author so it seem worth preserving especially as he too had been a doctor to the community and, though he was described as a Surgeon in those nineteenth century times, he would have provided a service as physician, surgeon and apothecary not much different from  that of the dispensing country doctor of the late twentieth century. This particular medical man also dabbled in writing so I felt a duty to preserve his efforts.

Leith Walk is long and,while it is all downhill one way, it is all uphill on the way back. It is a  wonderfully cosmopolitan  stroll.
A wide busy road with some imposing Georgian and Victorian     architecture if you look up from the activity at street level, it made a change from the country walks I usually manage.

Imposing frontage

It always pays to look up

 You could eat in almost any corner of the globe in the coffee-shops, restaurants, cafes and takeaways that line the street - Punjabi, Nepalese, Turkish, Tibetan, Indian, Italian, Polish, Chinese, Thai, Kurdish, American as well as organic, and macrobiotic, and vegetarian.  Little local shops have a huge range of services and produce - Fruit and veg., bakery, fishmongers, wine merchants, Halal butchers, Italian and Chinese delicatessens sit cheek by jowl with tattooists, body building gyms, tanning parlours, hair dressers and barbers some offering hair braiding , interspersed with second hand furniture shops, auction rooms, florists, solicitors, estate agents, carpet sellers, picture framers, IT consultants, printers charity shops and a tarot card reader.   Dozens of people all trying to earn a living. To get some money to spend in other shops.
Sometimes city walks can be just as enjoyable and a stimulating as tramping the high moors.
 LotH  having still not completed the shopping trip, another stroll  took me along to the National Gallery to have a look at the Turner water colours.  An experience ruined by the incessant chattering of middle aged, middle class, Edinburgh women who would be the first to shush any one speaking during a play or a concert but seem to think it is acceptable to blether mindlessly while viewing  the work of one of our nation's finest painters.    Silence should be a rule in art galleries.